Omar Sharif? Sans serif? I shot the SHERIFF? 
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/devils advocate
My first thought was if we were going to hear in a few days that this poor chap was bullied to within an inch of his life, the school did nothing & to his not yet matured brain, he had no other viable optionsā¦ I feel nothing but pity for this wee lad. He has no concept of āpermanenceā yet, and if this last school year was āhellā then that means that 1/16th of his life was. Prolly didnāt help that school councilors likely told him that he best do good in school because the rest of his life depends on it (worst lie ever repeatedly told to high schoolers - even worse than āabstinence is the only optionā)
Not that I disagree (and this isnāt a reply to your statement, just inspired by it), but if this child didnāt have a gun he likely would have stabbed them in their sleep. This guy didnāt have a gun and stabbed 14 (FTA: seven chillin & three adults died) or this guy who <a href=āhttp://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/716668"ā>stabbed ten chillin (FTA: one adult died, all chillin survived). I agree with you on guns, but theyāre misuse is a symptom of different problems - mainly healthcare & education. If the causes for triggering (no puns in serious topics) the shootings arenāt addressed either first or in conjunction with āgun controlā (Iāll admit, Iām not sure what that really entails) Americans will get all stabby with each other in no time. Every push for gun control should be a push for healthcare & gun control @ minimum.
Note: those were just the top two stabbings I recalled hearing about recently, but switch Google to a local with no civilian gun ownership - or extremely low civilian gun ownership (like Britain or Australia) and search for stabbings. Violence will switch to the next easiest method. Granted, guns make it too easy - personally I blame the Meiji Restoration for that, but thatās prolly just me.
Add: typed on crummy iPhone. Apologies in advance for any automangles I didnāt manually correct.
Edit: found one after posting (no preview in mobile?)
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Most countries. The United States has almost 113 privately owned firearms per 100 residents. The next closest contender is Cyprus, which has fewer than 70 guns per 100 residents. No other country has even half our gun ownership rate, even if you count the firearms that are part of Switzerlandās militia forces.
This is not to say that you are necessarily more likely to get shot in the United States than in any other country. But if you are a 16-year-old looking to get your hands on a semi-automatic pistol then thereās no better place to be than the good olā USA.
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Speaking as someone who lived through several years of regular knife attacks (multiple times per week), I beg to differ about the relative dangers of the two weapons.
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Makes sense. Doesnāt want to get up so he then get up, rummages around to find a knife, then has to run around stabbing everyone. And then heās up for the day anyway.
Boy, if only someone has ever done any science on surviving stabbings versus gunshots.
If only.
āWe see that mortalities for each pointed weapon are not significantly different from mortalities for all pointed weapons, but that mortalities for stab wounds are significantly less than mortalities from gun shots.ā
Please donāt play Devilās Advocate. Your strawman doesnāt stand up to it and there are enough people around who will defend guns anyway.
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Indeed. The same week as Sandy Hook a psycho in China carried out an eerily similar attack at an elementary school, with approximately the same number of victims. But he used a knife instead of a gun, and all his victims survived.
Availability of weapons dramatically changes outcomes.
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You never spent an evening with a purring cat on your lap? Or woke up with a warm fuzzball sleeping snuggled up to you?
Birds are dumb (with exception of a few strains but I assume we are talking about the grossly overrated songbirds), noisy, and crap on everything. Teach a bird to crap in a box and we can start talking.
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Birds crap on everything because they donāt have a cloacal sphincter. Itās an adaptation for flying. As soon as thereās shit, itās falling out of the bird, lightening the payload.
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This particular incident was a crime of spontaneous anger and annoyance, from everything we know. Getting up in the middle of the night to kill people in their sleep takes planning and preparation.
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You must live in one of those countries where this glaring truth is considered debatable. Oh wait, the ONE country where it is.
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I do like the image that makes it look like Dennis the Menace snapped and went on a killing spree. However, the local news of the event portrays this as a gang member with rage issues. I guess that should not matter, but it does, I think. Only because the solutions to the problem of armed criminal gangs is different from the solution to keeping Dennis the Menace from arming himself. Still a serious problem, but a different one.
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Some of them must have some degree of control: Skuas are known to use their excrement to knock down penguins, thus inspiring dive-bombing. A former acquaintance who filmed in that part of the world was knocked over by a half-pound lump of skua excrement, probably doing around 60kph. The skua was definitely trying to send a message.
It isnāt only primates that have evolved to use projectile weapons.
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Someone who thought gun safes or trigger locks were too dangerous because they use time which could be used to quick draw home invaders, zombies, or Jehovahās Witnesses.
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Or completely innocent young black women with broken down cars, looking for help.
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Iām just going off of what I was taught in the comparative anatomy portion of high school biology.
Itās probably just the general rule for birds. Nothing set in stone.
Dissections. Were. Awful.
I didnāt mind hacking up a few plastinated animals so much. It was the smell of formaldehyde that did me in.
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But people also keep catsā¦cold eyed predators with no redeeming features that give people a brain infection.
ā¦
You never spent an evening with a purring cat on your lap? Or woke up with a warm fuzzball sleeping snuggled up to you?
It can be two things.
I love my adorable wannabe leopard in the body of a domestic shorthair. But he is also evil incarnate as well. Especially early in the morning when he wants to be fed or tries to see how much of my foot he can fit in his mouth.
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I find the mentality that itās a punishment to restrict gun ownership to be silly. Where on Maslowās hierarchy of needs do guns sit?
Since you seem to think that the currently number of murders and accidental deaths by gun violence in this country are not high enough to warrant stricter gun laws, what number of such incidents reaches your perception of unacceptable? How many more people could be murdered or accidentally killed by guns (weāll ignore suicide for now, though gun control could decrease that since gun suicides can be more spontaneous than other forms of suicide that allow the person more time to rethink the act) before you would accept that stronger laws are necessary? Iām not even talking about a total ban, just stricter controls on sales of guns and ammunition, registering all ownership and tracking all thefts and sales, among other possible actions.
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As Iāve pointed out before, people donāt seem to view restricting dynamite sales that way even though the vast majority of people who buy and use dynamite do so for perfectly legitimate reasons.
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Iāve not had much exposure to dynamite enthusiasts and the magazines they read, but Iām guessing dynamite manufacturers donāt tout the effectiveness of its use in killing human beings in their advertisements or sell human-shaped targets for the purpose of practicing on them.
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